Data sonification with R: the sound of Twitter data

What does a tweet sound like? Not the kind that flies around in the air, but the kind that zips to and from our mobile devices. I’m intensely interested in finding ways to make sense of data. Sonification of data – representing data with sound – offers one way to do that. This post steps through R code to take the text of tweets and turn them into short chirping sounds. It also uses different tones for different users so that each user has a “voice”. In other words, this post shows how to use R to make Twitter data sing.